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Open Government one year on

Conservative leader Stephen Harper casts his shadow on the Canadian flag during a news conference in Fredericton, New Brunswick.Photo: REUTERS/Andy Clark

Michael MacDonald

Published: November 14, 2012 - 5:13 PM

Updated: November 19, 2012 - 10:37 AM

It’s been one year since the federal government announced its Open Government initiative.

Regarded by many as the brainchild of the current President of the Treasury Board and prolific tweeter, Tony Clement, Open Government aims to usher in a stronger level of accountability and provide more transparency in government as well as rethink the way stakeholders get access to information.

“I think the principle of open government is to when you give more data out, when you make it more readily available in formats that are easily understandable and can be used for different purposes, it creates whole avenues of opportunities for consumer products as well as a better dialogue between government and the citizenry,” Clement said a year ago in an interview with the Canadian Press.

The open data portal collates 260,000 federal government data sets covering everything from immigration statistics to mapping co-ordinates for key pieces of government infrastructure and even mineral deposits.

“Open Government should provide information as to help citizens with things such as waiting times at hospitals,” said public policy entrepreneur, David Eaves in a telephone interview.

According to Eaves, Canada is somewhere in the middle of the pack when it comes to government information being made accessible online, trailing behind leaders such as U.S. and the U.K.

So why is it that a government that scrapped the long-form census, much to the chagrin of many Canadians, is so eager to make information more accessible online?

“I guess the left hand can do one thing while the right hand does something else,” Eaves muses. “Cutting the long-form census was a terrible mistake. It has cause long-term damage to the economy.”

Presumably though, the more reliable and efficient Open Government becomes, the more efficient government will become as a direct result.

By being able to direct an individual to a website for a central collection of properly indexed and catalogued information, rather than having a public servant dig around for various files, the data portal should be able to save the government both time and money.

In addition, it’s the hope that public servants will use the free service to create better policy that’s more reflective of their constituents and statistical realities.

While it’s still early days for the federal data portal, it’s reassuring that government is continuing its commitment to pull itself out of the bronze age, technologically speaking.

However, there remains lots of work to be done going forward.

For some peculiar reason, the licensing agreement has yet to be streamlined across the country. Different provinces and municipalities — spanning dozens of open data portals for all levels of government across Canada — have different rules and regulations as to how citizens can use the data they find.

Furthermore, data needs to be standardized with regards to formats and presentation. More departments need to be brought on board to improve the amount of data that is available, it needs to be organized and catalogued properly, updated frequently and coordinated between levels of government to offer similar data sets formatted in similar ways.

We do after all live in an age where the free flow of information has been integral to the lifeblood of our economy and daily life.

The program is still in its infancy, and many improvements remain to be made. But Canada is moving in the right direction. Now we just need to pick up the pace.